We live in a seemingly free country, so we’re told. But that may be because the majority of us have never spent time in a war zone or highly secured police state-like environment.

Few of us understand what it looks like when military and state intelligence assets take over.

Those who do understand, and have themselves implemented such plans in other countries, see exactly what’s going on and they are sounding the alarm (often falling on deaf ears).

In Concord, New Hampshire the local police chief has filed a requisition with the Department of Homeland Security to beef up his police force with a Ballistic Engineered Armored Response Counter Attack Truck to quell any disturbances initiated by activists or other potential domestic terrorists. In response, the residents held a city council meeting, prompting a retired Marine Colonel to weigh in.

He was formerly a coordinator tasked with manning, training and equipping the Iraqi Army throughout the northern provinces, and he candidly shares his insights and compares the nationwide lock-down in Iraq to what’s happening right here at home.

This is coming from someone who knows – someone who has seen exactly how a population is put under control by Read more…

Newly declassified documents, obtained by George Washington University’s National Security Archive, appear to for the first time acknowledge the existence of Area 51. Hundreds of pages describe the genesis of the Nevada site that was home to the government’s spy plane program for decades. The documents do not, however, mention aliens.

The project started humbly. In the pre-drone era about a decade after the end of World War II, President Eisenhower signed off on a project aimed at building a high-altitude, long-range, manned aircraft that could photograph remote targets. Working together, the Air Force and Lockheed developed a craft that could hold the high-resolution cameras required for the images, a craft that became the U-2. Why “U-2″?

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The data divers at the Defense Department know better than most how to how to track down someone just by looking at his phone records. Now they want to know if America’s enemies could cause a fiscal meltdown or a massive cyber attack by combing through Netflix queues, Uber accounts, and Twitter feeds.

The doomsday thinkers over at DARPA are looking for researchers to “investigate the national security threat posed by public data available either for purchase or through open sources.” The question is, could a determined data-miner use only publicly available information–culled from Web pages and social media or from a consumer data broker–to cause “nation-state type effects.” Forget identify theft. DARPA appears to be talking about Read more…

I’ve written for years about how Detroit should serve as a stark warning to Americans who believe in liberal social policies, like highly progressive taxes and expensive social safety nets.

These socialist programs don’t cure income inequality. They merely destroy wealth by reducing incentives for building businesses and encouraging dependency. That’s why societies with lots of government spending typically have few civil institutions and a small middle class.

Here’s the message our politicians on both sides of the aisle seem to miss: Fifty years ago, Detroit was one of the largest and wealthiest cities in the world. Nearly 2 million people lived there, and it enjoyed the highest per-capita income in the United States.

Then, in 1960, everything changed.

Liberal Democrats came to power (and have held power since). Their ideas about using the government to build Read more…

Is the U.S. Exaggerating the Terror Threat to Embassies to Silence Critics of NSA Domestic Surveillance?

Greenwald also discusses Reuters’ report on the Drug Enforcement Agency spying on Americans.

The Obama administration has announced it will keep 19 diplomatic posts in North Africa and the Middle East closed for up to a week, due to fears of a possible militant threat. On Sunday, Senator Saxby Chambliss, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the decision to close the embassies was based on information collected by the National Security Agency. “If we did not have these programs, we simply would not be able to listen in on the bad guys,” Chambliss said, in a direct reference to increasing debate over widespread spying of all Americans revealed by Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian. “Nobody has ever questioned or disputed that the U.S. government, like all governments around the world, ought to be eavesdropping and monitoring the conversations of people who pose an actual threat to the United States in terms of plotting terrorist attacks,” Greenwald says. Pointing to the recent revelations by leaker Edward Snowden that he has reported on, Greenwald explains, “Here we are in the midst of one of the most intense debates and Read more…

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Security: In addition to stockpiling over a billion bullets and thousands of semiautomatic weapons the feds would deny U.S. citizens, the vehicle of choice for fighting the counterinsurgency war in Iraq is appearing on U.S. streets.

The sequestration question du jour is why the Department of Homeland Security, busy releasing hundreds, if not thousands, of deportable and detained illegal aliens due to budget constraints, is buying several thousand Mine Resistant Armored Protection (MRAP) vehicles?

And just who are they intended to be used against?

This acquisition comes on top of the recent news of the stockpiling by DHS of more than 1.6 billion (with a ‘b’) bullets of various calibers, enough by one calculation to fight the equivalent of a 24-year Iraq War, and the ordering of some 7,000 5.56x45mm NATO “personal defense weapons” (PDW) — also known as “assault weapons” when owned by civilians.

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Matt Lease, a computer scientist at the University of Texas, is working on ways to literally record all human conversations no matter where they take place. But his research is being funded by the Department of Defense, raising the question of how such a technology might be used in the hands of the government.

Lease’s plan is to utilize crowdsourcing, voice recognition software and everyday devices like smartphones to gather human speech, whether in a business meeting or on the street, and store it somewhere so people could access what they said anytime.

He told Wired’s Danger Room that he saw the work as both a “need and opportunity to really make conversational speech more accessible, more part of our permanent record instead of being so ephemeral, and really trying to imagine what this world would look like if we really could capture all these conversations and make use of them effectively going forward.”

If successful, this new system could raise “some thorny legal and social questions about privacy,” wrote Robert Beckhusen at Wired.

One example cited by Lease involves “respecting the privacy rights of multiple people involved,” and how to gain permission of everyone talking before capturing and storing a conversation. In the hands of spy agencies, this is not expected to be an issue.